Apple lashes out at French DRM legislation

Apple responds to the legislation passed by the French National Assembly. If …

Apple responded angrily to a bill passed yesterday by the National Assembly, the lower house of the French parliament. If approved by the French Senate, the legislation would require all companies selling DRMed music in the country to open up their proprietary formats for licensing by other companies. The intent is to ensure that consumers can play songs purchased from any online music service on their digital music player of choice.

In a statement, the company said that the French bill will result in increased piracy at a time when legal music downloads are growing quickly.

"The French implementation of the EU Copyright Directive will result in state-sponsored piracy," said Apple spokeswoman Natalie Kerris. "If this happens, legal music sales will plummet just when legitimate alternatives to piracy are winning over customers."

The "state-sponsored piracy" remark is an obvious jab at the DRM interoperation facet of the law. Apple's argument appears to be that if companies are forced to reveal how their DRM functions, it is only a matter of time until the tools that "swap" one form of DRM for another—say, FairPlay AAC playable on an iPod to WMA playable on a Samsung—become widely available to the public. Any such tool would have to strip the FairPlay encoding from an Apple-DRMed AAC file, transcode it to WMA, and add new DRM.

Sounds convoluted, right? It would be, and there are far easier ways to get a song that will play on your Creative Zen (i.e., P2P networks). Apple's arguments about increased piracy resulting from the legislation are questionable, and are little more than smoke and mirrors to distract us from the real issue.

The French legislation is a punch to the gut of Apple's one-stop shop for music. The more obvious route to interoperability would come in the form of firmware updates for digital music players that would allow them to play the FairPlay-protected AAC files sold by the iTunes Music Store. The original tracks would remain in their unmolested and DRMed form, but non-iPod music players would then be able to perform the previously verboten task of playing tracks from iTMS. Just like that, Apple's lock-in vanishes, along with some of their customers.

Still unanswered is the question of whether Apple will leave the French market if the bill is passed. Analysts estimate that France is responsible for around 5 percent of Apple's global music sales, so the financial blow from exiting the country would not be severe. However, if the French legislation is adopted across all of the European Union—which is the stated goal of France's Cultural Minister—the company would find itself in a much tougher situation.

If that happens, Apple will try to continue its dominance of the online music market without having its customers locked into its music store and digital music player. The company seems ready for the challenge, defiantly saying that "iPod sales will likely increase as users freely load their iPods with 'interoperable' music which cannot be adequately protected."

If the bill makes it through the French Senate in May, it should make for some interesting times in the online music business. And that sound you'll be hearing in the background is the gleeful laughter of Napster, RealNetworks, and other online music store executives.